I’ve started reflecting on moments in my career and have found it to have almost healing like benefits, particularly when reflecting on the more challenging moments. It may sound strange, but it’s a little like when you grieve for a loved one, years later the regular discussion with your partner or someone close helps heal the sole in a way that’s difficult to describe.

This blog isn’t going to be a potted history of the most challenging moments in my career (note to self, that’ll be a good one for the future as there’s quite a few of them) though I would like to share a time where a significant change affected me and my family, and I found solace and direction from a book. Guidance to focus on an approach that help to maintain my sanity.

How it started.

It was 2014, I’d been working for a company for four years and absolutely loved my job, the people I worked with and what we stood for. We were on a high, growing fast and everyone felt a sense of belonging and real purpose being part of something special. And then, we were acquired, without any notice, BAM! I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. What will happen, what will my job be, who will I work with, so many questions no one could answer for several months. Just keep going they said, stay focused and all will be okay.  

I had faith in my leadership team, I believed in them, so when I asked to focus on an emerging market, an untouched market and was eventually told, if you run UK Enterprise, and test the new market, I was excited for the adventure that lay ahead.  

The new market covered 103 countries across Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.  

I set a course with one of my sales reps focused on a selection of countries, with a narrow value proposition that I knew we could execute well on.  And in our first year we closed several deals totalling >$2M.

Along the way

In our second year I inherited another team in the region covering a different segment, increased the sales team to six and relocated my family to the region.

Fast forward to the end of the fourth year in the region, we were now a forty strong team and we’d successfully grown the business through a military coup in Turkey, our 2nd most successful country and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which slowed spending significantly in the region. We were selling in all primary and now secondary focused countries and we’d built a business generating $22M ARR with a 90% customer retention rate. The future looked bright.  

How it ended

And then, I was told it would all change. My team whom I loved would report to other teams across our region. I tried to keep a core group of us together in a new team but the talent was to shared across other teams. 

I tried extremely hard to learn from this experience, find positives from something so catastrophic. My earnings dropped by 50%, it caused a huge strain, so my Wife and children moved back to the UK. I had no other options I had to make the new job work or find another company to work for.  

A new approach.  

Someone from my team in the previous year had left to join another company, a company I’d followed and I respected their approach. He popped in to say high to the team and we were chatting. We discussed how things were in his new company, some of the similarities to the way we approached things and he told me about an approach they live by, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, a book by Sean Covey. At the time I thought it sounded interesting and so bought the audio book and was hooked.  The audio book is about 20 hours long and I must have listened to it a hundred times, on the way to work and back, at home every chance I got, as I taught myself this new approach, a lot of the time it was putting names on things I was already doing with my team - this approach will help teams achieve the impossible.  

The book essentially teaches you about how to achieve wildly important goals, goals that are seemingly impossible.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus or Sisyphos (/ˈsɪsɪfəs/; Ancient Greek: Σίσυφος Sísyphos) was the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth). Zeus punished him for cheating death twice by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classical influence on modern culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean

We often refer to laborious modern tasks as being stuck in the hamster wheel.  

This book, 4DX, takes you and your entire team out of the hamster wheel to carve out a new approach that will allow you to do seemingly impossible things by focusing on high impact activities that move mountains.  

Which is what I needed, given the job I was being offered and the task that lay ahead.

4DX gave me the focus, the language, the approach to lead my new team in the face of impossibility!

Until the time I could rejoin my family in the UK six months later. Which I did and was promoted twice in the following seven months doing what I love, enabling my teams and others to be successful and feel a sense of belonging and real purpose with what they do. I personally experienced the most fulfilling times of my career when I walked the corridors with purpose and felt like I belonged to something quite special. 

Since leaving the corporate world I founded Supero. Our vision is to help MarTech companies accelerate growth and improve profitability by providing sales-as-a-service, paying particular attention to community based, pipeline generation initiatives aligned to growth.

In 2022 added a new string to our bow, we are pioneering a Social Selling & Influence program to enable our clients to bring consistency to pipeline growth and talent acquisition. It’s the only Social Selling & Influence program in the world to come with an official, globally recognised qualification from the Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP), which is delivered by Supero & the ISP. 

For more information please DM me on LinkedIn or Twitter: @Alex_Supero 

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